A Comparative Study Of Semantic Prosody Of The Near Synonyms Used By Chinese EFL Learners And Native English Speakers

Semantic prosody is the fruit of the development of corpus linguistics in recent years. It was first mentioned by Sinclair in 1991. Semantic prosody refers to the consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates. Generally speaking, semantic prosody is divided into positive, negative and neutral or mixed semantic prosody or a certain set of meaning. This thesis combines the two classifications and further divides mixed semantic prosody into positive-neutral mixed, positive-negative mixed, neutral-negative mixed and wholly mixed semantic prosody.Nowadays, the empirical studies of semantic prosody are not abundant. In China, the empirical studies are still at primary stage. And there are only a few contrastive studies of native speakers and Chinese EFL learners. The contrastive study of semantic prosody of near synonyms is even fewer. The distinguishment of near synonyms is the focus and difficulty in language teaching and learning. This paper explores the semantic prosody of three groups of near synonyms: prevent and control; obtain and gain; provide and offer. Based on CLEC and BNC, this paper employs data-driven approach to investigate the semantic prosody features of the near synonyms used by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers and then concludes their similarities and differences.The procedure includes three steps: Firstly, the node words are searched by AntConc to get their concordance lines and all the collocates. Then, with the assistance of Excel, MI value of all the collocates are calculated to identify the significant collocates. And when the MI value is above 3.0, the collocates are considered as significant. Lastly, the semantic prosody features are concluded through analysing the significant collocates. And the data from the two corpora are compared to figure out the similarities and differences between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers. The findings show that near synonyms differ in classifications of semantic prosody. To be more specific, prevent has mixed semantic prosody while control has neutral semantic prosody; both obtain and gain have mixed semantic prosody but obtain tends to co-occur with collocates related to money or research, and both provide and offer show mixed semantic prosody, but provide tends to collocate with words related to political and academic affairs while offer is inclined to collocate with words relevant to economic activities. And Chinese EFL learners still have some problems in mastering semantic prosody.The findings of this research provides practical implications for EFL teaching and learning. When introducing a new word, the teacher should emphasize the knowledge of semantic prosody so as to enhance the awareness of semantic prosody in students. The introduction of semantic prosody features in vocabulary teaching would help students to distinguish near synonyms.